Recently as the virtual and/or physical address space that can be accessed by an application program has increased, the size of a conventional address has increased from 32 bits to 64 bits. As a result, the pointers that are used to reference the address space have also doubled in size. When pointers are stored in caches, memory, and/or registers, the capacities of the caches, memory, and/or registers may also need to increase. Additionally, the amount of bandwidth that is consumed to access and transfer the pointers also increases. The energy required to transfer these pointers increases as well.
Thus, there is a need for reducing the amount of storage consumed by pointers and/or addressing other issues associated with the prior art.